Resident Evil: Ghost Ship chapter one
by AmericanEagleGuy
Summary: A cruise ship has become infected with the T-Virus, and the decks are swarming with blood thirsty zombies. A team of Coast Guard Officers are sent to explore the unresponsive vessel, unaware of the horror that awaits them...


**Chapter One: Steven Wright**

Steven Wright kept his back against the cold, stainless steel wall of the laboratory hallway, his wide, nervous eyes locked on the security camera mounted just above him. His heart was thudding like a drum in his chest as he waited for the tiny camera to turn. His back slid quietly down until he was in a crouch, edging his way under it. Beside him, the shining, silvery hallway took a sharp right. He couldn't remember if there were more cameras, but it was a risk he'd have to take if he wanted to get to the virus.

_Almost there, almost there._

The camera finally whirred toward Steven and stopped, but he was already gone, his footfalls silent as he sprinted down the hallway. He rounded the corner and pasted himself to the wall again, his chest heaving. His head snapped from side to side. This hallway was free of cameras and was rather dark, shadows crawling along the shimmering walls and blending with his black jumpsuit. Steven closed his eyes and relaxed, feeling his heart slow down, letting a long sigh escape his mouth through the tightness of his face-hugging ski mask. He slid one rough hand under it and rubbed sweat from his face, tucking a few loose strands of sandy blonde hair back into the mask. His dark brown eyes scanned the darkness. This hallway ran just under the RPD building if he remembered correctly; it would take him to a service elevator that led further underground to the labs. There was a sharp left at the end of the corridor that he needed to take, glowing faintly with dull white light.

_There's the break room. There may be a few researchers having some late night coffee. If there are, that's where I'll get my keycard._

Steven began to jog through the darkness, his footfalls silent on the slippery floor as they pulled him closer. He knew he'd have to watch his ass if he--

"I'm heading back down, lots more to do," came a smooth, tired voice from down the hallway. "Thanks for the coffee Mike." Steven frowned under his mask. It was the voice of David Carrington, one of the lead researchers in the T-Virus and Nemesis projects. Steven had never been fond of the man, always smiling in his own snooty way as he hunched over the synthesizer, watching vial after vial filling up with disgusting, infected blue liquid. Half of the hideous mutants locked up in the sub-basement were the result of his long hours of studying and planning, writing out chemical formulas and dreaming up more ways to end the world with a smile. He of all people would be carrying a keycard. He was so obsessed with his research that he didn't even go to sleep without it.

"David, can you come here for a sec?" Steven called down the hallway. David's footfalls stopped.

"That you, Steve?" he called back. His voice had a hint of irritability in it. Steven's brown eyes narrowed. He had no problem killing the bastard, but the thought of taking away his precious virus, the most important thing in his life, was somehow more satisfying.

"Yeah," Steven said, disguising his voice with fake frustration. "I can't find my keys. I just need to run upstairs, can I borrow yours?" From down the hallway came a long sigh of anger, and then fast footfalls coming his way. Steven sank into the shadows, waiting. He watched in silence as David rounded the corner, his eyes rolling behind his wire frames. His long, snow-white lab coat fluttered behind him, his slick, shiny shoes sharply tapping on the metal flooring.

"Honestly, Steve, you can't be working with infectious diseases and have your head up your ass," he mumbled. "You're gonna spill it and fucking kill us all someday." He stepped into the shadows just in front of Steven's hiding place, placing a hand on his hip and twirling his keys around his finger. "Steve? I don't have time for games, you little shit."

He cursed under his breath, turned, and began to walk away. Steven was out like a striking snake, wrapping one powerful arm around David's neck and digging a powerful punch into his gut with the other. David groaned, the sound choked off by Steven's tight grip on his neck. Steve choked off the air supply as David's hands clutched at the sleeve of his jumpsuit, his eyes already beginning to close, his legs getting wobbly.

"Give me your keycard now." Steven said in a dark, emotionless voice. Dr. Carrington elbowed Steve in the gut and he staggered back. Carrington struggled free and swung, his face a mix of fear and hatred.

"_Fuck you!_" he cried out as his fist hooked through the air. Steven caught it and twisted, wrenching his arm behind his back, bones popping and twisting. He slammed the man face first into the steel wall, his head bounding off with a hollow thud, leaving a ragged flower of blood that seeped down in slow rivulets. He replaced his arm around Dr. Carrington's neck, holding even tighter this time. At any second, the bones would snap.

"Last chance. Give me your card. _Now_." David's teeth were red with blood as they bared in anger.

"_You… son of a… bitch…I'll make sure… you're… killed for this,_" David struggled, blood gushing from his nose and down over his lips. Steven put both hands on David's chin and twisted with all his strength. There was a sharp tug and he felt something tight give way in Carrington's neck, the hollow snap-crunch of bone echoing in the hallway. David's eyes rolled into his head and he hit the floor in a loose heap, his head nearly resting on his shoulders backwards.

_Have a good time in Hell, you asshole_.

Steve kneeled beside the broken body, avoiding the half lidded whites of the dead man's eyes, and began rummaging through his pockets. His fingers wrapped around a pocketknife, which he promptly stuffed into his pocket. He pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes; tossed them to the side. A picture of Carrington's wife and family came next. Steve crumpled it up and threw it over his shoulder. A hankie, some loose change, a bottle of Umbrella's special pain relieving pills. Steven cursed him under his breath. He slid his hand into the deep pockets of David's lab coat, his eyes glimpsing the man's neck. The skin was stretched and bulging awkwardly. It looked like it was the only thing keeping the man's head on. The left pocket of the coat had a simple key ring, one of which was marked WEAPONS LOCKER. Steven smiled darkly to himself. They had some army-issue firepower down here, especially around the Bio-weapon levels. If he could get to one of those lockers, he'd be able to blast his way out of the lab if he needed to. He slid the keys into his pocket and shoved his free hand into the other pocket. His fingers grazed a plastic, laminated ID card with a metal bar running along its top. A lab key card.

_Bingo._

David smiled, his square jaws stretching the fabric of his mask, and quietly walked the length of the hallway, crawling along the floor past the break room. When he got to the elevator, he looked down at the shimmering card in his hand. He smiled as it slid smoothly into the reader and beeped, and a computer-generated voice said "Welcome, Dr. David Carrington." Steven crossed his arms and waited as there was a mechanical thud far below him, and the hissing of the elevator as it began to rise. A few moments later, the heavy doors slid silently open and he stepped into the dim blue glow of the elevator. Steven tugged the ski mask off, raking his straggly blonde hair to an almost-presentable mop on top of his head, and put on a calm, relaxed facial expression. His stomach lurched as the elevator sped deeper beneath the Earth's crust, deeper beneath the crowded, bustling streets of Raccoon City. The elevator halted, and the doors slid open. Cold, chemical-smelling air washed over him as he stepped into a well-lit hallway, looking from his right to his left. He'd never made it down this far before. Only the big boys got to come down to see the actual creatures they made here, the things he'd heard referred to as "Lickers" and Carrington's big, secretive operation called the Nemesis Project—

A heavy, gloved hand fell on his shoulder.

"Can I help you sir?" came a booming voice. Steven turned around and was face to face with a tall, muscular soldier. He wore black body armor, with the red and white umbrella symbol on one chest plate and his last name, JOHANSEN, on the other. He was a bald black man, and in his hands he held an MP5, his finger resting on the trigger. He stared at Steven as if he were a cockroach. Steven swallowed hard.

"Yes sir, I was sent down here by Dr. David Carrington, his uh…" Steven suddenly remembered the picture he had crumpled. "His wife had to take his kids to the hospital, and he wanted me to check his lab for his wallet. He didn't have time, I suppose."

The solider grunted and eyed David from head to toe.

"I have his keycard here, he said to show it to you and you'd let me pass."

There was a long, awkward silence between the two men, the soldier staring at Steve, Steve wondering when someone would stumble upon the body of Dr. Carrington, both of them impatient. The only sounds floating down the corridor were the sounds of work and experimentation, the muffled conversations of doctors, the beeping and whirring of computers, the soft hiss of the AC system. Then the soldier nodded forward and said simply, "Report directly to lab A6, get what you need, and get back to the upper levels. If you're not back in five minutes, you and I are going to have some problems, are we clear?" he said, his voice like thunder in the silent hallway. Behind them a door hissed open and a tired looking researcher walked out, rubbing his eyes. He wiped at his graying hair and nodded to the two men as he went by, heading for the elevator. Once he had gone, Steve turned back to the guard.

"Yeah, we're clear." He shrugged. "Just going after a wallet."

He felt warm dread swelling into his stomach. God only knew what kind of creatures they had created down here. He'd seen some horrid things since getting his job. The worst were the things everyone called "the zombies". The things that looked like they used to be people; slow, shambling, stupid. They looked like dead bodies that couldn't seem to lie still. They weren't much for weapons; a single bullet to the brain sent them down into a stinking heap of rotten flesh, but the T-Virus was swarming throughout those festering bodies, and one bite or scratch could be devastating. All of these hideous mutants, wandering around the lower labs, separated from the rest of humanity by a few locks and barricades…

He didn't have time to think about it. Whatever the virus did to people was valuable to someone, and frankly he didn't care who used it for what just as long as he was out of the way before the outbreak. He swallowed the fear that had begun to develop inside him, feeling sweat beading on his forehead, and nodded to the soldier. He kept a straight face and nodded back.

_He bought it. What are you so nervous about? You're going to waltz right in and steal it from under their noses._

The hall in front of him was lined with tiny white lights, washing cold, pitiless beams across the floor. It reminded him of a doctor's office, surprisingly clean and sterile for a viral experimentation facility. He felt like if he touched a wall, an alarm would go off and a mob of scientists would rush out and scrub the fingerprint. He supposed you had to be clean and careful when you worked with something as infectious as the T-Virus, but this place was just _ridiculous_.

_So a dead scientist with a broken neck is gonna stick out like shit on a white carpet in a place like this. Why not get your ass in gear?_

He walked faster. If he ran, the behemoth of a guard would suspect him and blow his head off before he knew he was busted. The hallway veered right; on the wall in front of him was a small metal sign with a listing of the labs he was approaching. He saw the A6 near the bottom and knew he was heading in the right direction. He also knew that any new creatures would more than likely be kept in the larger labs A2 or A4—which meant he'd be walking right past it. He made the right and saw that he'd reached the end of the maze of silvery hallways, the last corridor stretching far out in front of him, ending abruptly in another elevator. On the left side of the hall was a series of ten doors, all marked with the corresponding numbers from 1 to 10. On the right side was a gigantic red and white Umbrella logo, and huge, slanted letters that read simply WHITE UMBRELLA RACCOON FACILITY. Steven's nervous eyes glanced into the labs as he walked down the hallway as casually as he could, turning the sweat-sticky keycard over and over in his hands.

The first few labs were dark inside except for the few random glows of computers and other machinery; most of the other ones contained nothing more than a few scientists huddled around a table, or one puzzled looking worker hunched over a computer desk with a steaming cup of coffee. Behind him, a door hissed open.

"Excuse me doctor. Can you give me a hand in here?"

Steven whirled around, his mind screaming for a reply. Whoever had spoken to him was leaning out of a lab, his hands covered with white rubber gloves. He was wearing a white smock and goggles, and from the look of him, he had been working a long time. His beard was messy and unkempt, his eyes surrounded by dark spots.

"I'm actually not a doctor, I'm just--"

"I'm a little tired, and I have some more work to do with the virus. Look, all I need you do is hold it for me. I don't want to take the risk of dropping it." He nibbled his lip, eyeing Steven pleadingly. He drummed his gloved hands on the door.

_God, these people are pathetic. Anything for their research._

Steven put on his best researcher face, and glanced down at his watch.

"Well, I've got some important experiments to do. You said you're working with the virus in there? The T-Virus?"

The scientist's face crumpled with confusion behind his goggles.

"Yes, doctor. We only have the one; Birkin hasn't finished the G-Virus yet, remember?"

Steven pretended to know what the man was talking about.

_He's got the virus in there. Go in, do whatever he asks you to do, and then tell him you need it, for an experiment of your own. Then smuggle it out, and you're a rich man._

"You're right," Steven said, faking a concerned expression. The researcher smiled tiredly, opening the door wider as Steven joined him. "I wouldn't want you to drop the virus, an outbreak would be extraordinarily dangerous."

"You ain't kidding," the doctor said as he approached a cabinet at the back of the room. He opened it and handed a smock to Steven, and tucked a pair of goggles into the pocket. He watched quietly as Steven slid it on over his jumpsuit. "We got a radio transmission from the lab up in the Arklays about a week ago. You know, the old Spencer estate? Seems one of the researchers got a little too tired and dropped an entire case of the virus. It's escaped all over that mansion; last I heard most of the staff was infected. Too risky to do anything about it though." He rubbed his weathered hands through his beard, making dull scratching noises in the silence of the lab. He winked when Steven finished tying the smock around him, and shot a thumb over his shoulder.

"Right through here," he said tiredly, pushing open a pneumatic hinge door. Steven walked inside a room easily cold enough to be a freezer. The walls were lined with machines Steven did not recognize; huge, beeping and whirring machines lined with shimmering chemicals of all colors.

_Holy hell, an outbreak in the mountains outside the city and they're letting it go unchecked? What if those zombies happen to wander down into the streets? _

"Here. Here you go," came the scientist's smooth, tired voice. He scratched his beard again with his free hand as Steven's greedy stare followed his arm down to his wrist, his wrist to his hand. Clutched in his gloved fingers was a small, shimmering glass tube. The thick, mucus-like fluid inside wasn't blue; it was green. Steven felt anger boil up inside him. Everyone knew that the blue fluid was the dangerous stuff. The green fluid was nothing more than an anti-virus. That stuff was no more infectious than the cooties back in Kindergarten.

"You said we'd be working with the T-Virus," he said, trying to sound calm, keep his researcher-like cool. "I'm much too busy to be dealing with--"

"Oh, we are working with the virus. The experiment is right over here, doctor."

_Sweet fuck, what have you gotten yourself into? Now you're gonna be working with grandpa all night. Did you forget Michael Clark Duncan out there? That guard gave you five minutes. It takes this guy five minutes to take a breath._

"Several days ago, we selected a certain… troublesome staff member for a special experiment," the man said, walking to the wall of the lab. He pressed a glowing switch on the wall and a metal sheet slid down with a dull hiss, spilling cold fog that drifted across the floor and curled around Steven's ankles.

_Oh, God._

"We introduced the anti-virus into his system before sending him into a room filled with those zombie-creatures. He thought he was on a routine inventory check," the scientist said, grinning behind his goggles. His teeth were sour and yellow. Way too much coffee.

_Don't tell me he's got an infected corpse in there._

"He didn't last long. They were on him almost as soon as he stepped inside. As you'll see shortly," he continued, sliding his arms inside the freezer. He groaned slightly as he yanked the shelf out with a quiet sliding sound. Lying on the shelf, surrounded by the chilly white fog, was a humanoid shape wrapped from head to toe in plastic. Whatever was inside was a pale shade of green. "He was killed by massive trauma to the throat and stomach. His spinal column and brain stem are undamaged. Given the massive attacks he sustained, he should have revived within minutes, but he's still as dead as a doornail. We're going to take a blood sample, and match it up with the chemical properties of the Anti-virus. If it's what's been keeping him down, then we have a cure for the T-Virus." He tapped his skull as if he had been the one responsible for the potential cure.

_Just show me the fucking virus, gramps._

The doctor gestured toward the body's shoulders.

"Grab a handful," he said calmly, letting a long yawn slide out of his mouth. Steven looked down at the blurred image of a face beneath he plastic. It crinkled dryly as the old doctor grabbed the ankles. "Come on now, you've seen these things before." Steven's stomach crawled slowly into his throat. The thing looked like a disgusting piece of freezer-burned hamburger meat. It had a chemical smell radiating from it, a smell like formaldehyde and Clorox, and it was burning his nostrils. Worst of all, there were grotesque flowers of blood splattered all over the inside of the bag.

Steven swallowed a clump of vomit in his throat. He took a step toward the body, eying the blank, emotionless blur of a face under the plastic. He imagined the dead eyes swiveling in the dried, frozen sockets, glaring at him from beneath he plastic, watching him, waiting for him. Dead, putrid breath fogging the plastic, the thing would make a horrible, groaning sound and claw its way out of the plastic, those glazed, dead eyes seeing nothing but food, those slack, dead jaws hanging open…

"Doctor, if you please. We just have to carry him to the autopsy table, no more than a few feet. He won't bite. Well, we _hope_ he won't bite," the man said happily. He gave a deep belly chuckle at his joke. Steven supposed it would be funny to someone who worked for Umbrella. Someone who turned down their kid's baseball game to retreat to chilly labs miles beneath the streets of Raccoon City, to stare at computerized models of viruses and inject them into cute little furry rabbits, then watch them grow and mutate into things far worse than nightmares ever dreamed of.

_Sick fuckers. Then again, it's not like you're any better, Stevie-boy. They made the virus… you're stealing it, and selling it to someone who will probably start a global plague. What really separates you from them? And have we forgotten Dr. Dave Carrington, the jerk whose head is on backwards upstairs? _

The thought of David Carrington's lifeless body lying in the hallway jarred Steven out of his childlike reluctance. Someone would find it, and soon. The scientists rarely stopped, and in the small hours of the morning, many of them would be waking up from their sleeping quarters, and the hallways would be humming with the sound of busy worker bees as they scurried about their hive. He had already wasted enough time to compromise his plans, and wasting anymore would end almost certainly like the man he was gazing at, lifeless and teeming with T-cells, wrapped like old leftovers in a plastic body bag. He stepped to the body and rested his hands under the shoulders, wincing at the old, dried-fish feel—and smell—of the corpse.

"That's it," said the doctor through grunts as Steven's fingers sank into the rigid, stiff, dead flesh. Steve's arms flexed as they lifted the body from the table, the head flopping back on the shoulders. Steven caught a glimpse of the white, lifeless eyes, still very much open, but seeing nothing. "Just over here. Sorry he's so heavy, the virus tends to… make 'em bloat up a little." They lugged the corpse over to an autopsy table, shoved crudely in the corner of the room and lined with slick, silvery tools. They flopped him down with a crinkled thump, his head flopping over the metal lip of the table. The scientist grabbed the plastic and jerked hard, pulling it straight again. The lifeless head thunked onto the table and rocked from side to side, the milky eyes gazing blankly. Steven glanced down at his hands. There was a cold, oily residue on his gloves, glistening wetly in the light. He felt his stomach heave, hot vomit surging up his throat.

"Easy now," said the old man, busily lining the glimmering tools in the order he'd be using them. Steven's watering eyes scanned over various hooks, shears, and handsaws. Soon, he'd have to watch this maniacal scientist use them one by one on the corpse, raking off flesh, separating muscle, sawing bone, and removing organs. A fresh wave of the stench hovered around his face, and he bit his tongue to keep the puke down.

"Lift him up on his side doctor, and we can begin," the man said slowly. He winked. Steven suddenly wanted to gouge his eyes out.

_God, just do it. You've come too far to back out now. It's not like you've never seen a dead body before. Just don't look at its eyes. Just don't look at its eyes, Stevie-boy._

Steven wrapped his gloved fingers around the dead man's beef-jerky shoulder and rolled him on his side, his limbs rolling around loosely. The plastic crinkled wetly as it peeled from the table. "Excuse me sir, but your fly's undone," the bearded scientist said, his tongue poking out of his mouth as he searched for the zipper that sealed the body bag. Steven closed his eyes, trying to ignore the cold, rotten feel of the body in his grasp. He watched in horror as the doctor began to slip the wet plastic from around the body's head, the corpse hair underneath already beginning to fall out and cling to the inside of the plastic. It was a tangled, matted mop on the top of a rancid, dried-vegetable forehead.

Steven thought: _Dear God, don't let it wake up._

To be continued…


End file.
